12-17-2020, 12:52 PM | #21 | |
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Make Animals Threatening [Basic]
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A society with some TL8 gadgets isn't a TL8 society; it's a lower-TL society with gadgets. Transhuman Space went into it in more detail, and an upcoming supplement will discuss it more, but in brief: The world average is TL4 or perhaps TL5; it's just that the world's cutting edge is TL8, so the TL4 parts have TL5-8 gadgets, the TL5 parts have TL6-8 gadgets, the TL6 parts have TL7-8 gadgets, and the TL7 parts have TL8 gadgets. But to "be TL8," the majority of your gadgets have to be nominally TL8. Don't mistake the absence of the specific visuals of late-medieval Europe or Steam Age London for the absence of TL4 or TL5 realities. Privileged people living in high-tech societies tend to forget that they don't define the average, and tend to see the presence of their benevolence toward lower-TL regions as proof that they've raised the TL there. They haven't. The single biggest marker is probably "What's the modifier to aging rolls where you live?" (p. B444). If you're rolling against HT+1 rather than HT+5, your society is probably TL4 and not TL8, whatever gadgets you have.
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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12-17-2020, 12:57 PM | #22 |
Join Date: Jul 2014
Location: New Zealand.
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Re: Make Animals Threatening [Basic]
Animals can be a threat even if there is no direct combat.
Food supplies can get raided. Draft animals can be spooked Animals are part of the environment, treating them as such can add a lot of depth or challenge to wilderness adventure and travel. Wolves can keep people from sleeping. Does the party camp at a location that has signs of a large predator nearby? How do you relax after seeing a mountain lion briefly twice in last two days. Tangling with a bolshey herbivore in a swamp is a great way for all your gear to get wet. Anyone who has been walking and had a hidden bird explode from its nest can attest to the reaction they can provoke. Who knows what creepy crawlies you can discover while climbing a steep cliff face. Making animals an interesting addition and even a threat doesn't require extra stats, in some cases just consider how they can make an adventurers life more "interesting"
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Waiting for inspiration to strike...... And spending too much time thinking about farming for RPGs Contributor to Citadel at Nordvörn Last edited by (E); 12-17-2020 at 01:03 PM. |
12-17-2020, 01:00 PM | #23 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Make Animals Threatening [Basic]
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Realistically, third world countries have a mix of technologies that can't accurately be described as a single TL. |
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12-17-2020, 01:06 PM | #24 | |
Join Date: May 2014
Location: Texas
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Re: Make Animals Threatening [Basic]
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12-17-2020, 01:08 PM | #25 | |
Join Date: Jul 2014
Location: New Zealand.
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Re: Make Animals Threatening [Basic]
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99.4% of the population has cell coverage. 24% of the land area has cell coverage.
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Waiting for inspiration to strike...... And spending too much time thinking about farming for RPGs Contributor to Citadel at Nordvörn |
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12-17-2020, 01:32 PM | #26 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Make Animals Threatening [Basic]
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For most of us they're a rather easily avoided threat but "Don't trespass in the dangerous animal's habitat" is a broadly applicable principle. I guess that leads to a "Lure your players into doing something stupid like going swimming with alligators." way to arranging dangerous animal encounters. However, you can easily get into areas where any encounter is going to be non-survivable.
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Fred Brackin |
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12-17-2020, 01:34 PM | #27 | |
Join Date: Aug 2018
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Re: Make Animals Threatening [Basic]
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The wolves in the school were sort of a red herring though. They made a big deal about a mysterious animal dragging off a walker and eating it, then coming to break into the gym... but then you never see'm again =/ |
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12-17-2020, 01:35 PM | #28 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2010
Location: Hmm, looks like Earth, circa CE 2020+
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Re: Make Animals Threatening [Basic]
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I can make and receive calls on my cell phone about one out of every two or three tries; I sometimes have to walk around the property to get reception. I usually got voice mails half an hour to an hour later; sometimes I get them the next day. A neighbor has a different carrier, which costs quite a bit more but works a little better. Still, fairly often they can't make or receive calls. If either one of us tries to make a cell phone call from the nearest market, which is pretty near the city offices, it almost never works. There's an area with a couple businesses about five miles from there where, as far as I know, nobody can get cell phone service. I would be curious to know the rural villages where beggars can afford cell phone service. Quote:
And good point about the "creepy crawlies." An armed commando could be taken down by an insect bite (or at least be terribly inconvenienced).
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12-17-2020, 01:36 PM | #29 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Seattle, WA
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Re: Make Animals Threatening [Basic]
I've found that players are often way MORE terrified of animals than they should be. Almost comically so. I'm not sure if this is PTSD from other RPGs, or something else, but this makes animals fun, often confusing, opponents in my games.
In one horror game, I had a small alligator lounging outside a swampy manor. The players were terrified of the thing. Even though they probably could have teamed up on it, scared it away, etc, they spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to deal with it. It more than served its purpose. (And in one session, a player critically failed his leap up the manor stairs to avoid the thing, faceplanting right in front of it...) I think if the alligator was instead a fully armed special ops agent guarding the door with a high-powered rifle, the players would have shrugged and just dealt with it with less caution. In that same game, I put a mildly poisonous snake down an old toilet the players had to reach into. The threat came from not seeing the thing until it was too late and its debilitating effects, not from the raw damage it output. |
12-17-2020, 01:50 PM | #30 |
Join Date: Oct 2004
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Re: Make Animals Threatening [Basic]
There have been several modern incidents in which animals have reportedly posed a threat to fit persons of combatant-age and not just lost children.
One is the incident of wolf packs attacking the soldiers on the eastern battlefields of WWI. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/ins...sians-wwi.html Another incident is the lions hunting railroad workers in Africa. https://www.fieldmuseum.org/blog/tsavo-lions Another well-known incident is the shark attack on the survivors of the USS Indianapolis. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histo...tory-25715092/ Another noted incident was the reported attack on a Japanese force by crocodiles at Ramree Island in 1945. https://www.historynet.com/ramree-battle-crocodiles.htm These incidents tend to be sensationalized. Of course, even in these extreme cases, where predators attacked soldiers, the number of those killed is not known for certain and the likely result is that the wounded were targeted by the attack and likely the ones most susceptible to becoming prey. By most any definition, these incidents were horrific. Kromm and others have addressed the idea of competency as a moderating device in horror RPGs. A GM could also use the same situations as in these historical attacks to disadvantage the PCs -- namely have the attacks at night, have the PCs outnumbered by the animals, and have the PCs suffering from crippling wounds, disease, blood loss, fatigue, illness, etc. In addition, in many of these situations, the prey was unarmed, or at least, limited ammunition/weaponry to hand. There's no reason you couldn't use any of these to raise tension and make the encounter dangerous. On top of this, these were all animals acting in an unusually aggressive way, one might say driven by the scent of blood and flesh into a pack/group feeding frenzy. I think this is still true, but a few years ago I recall reading that the most dangerous animal in the US to humans (outside of deer vs. car encounters) is dog attacks (which kill around 50 people a year, about 50x that of bears -- and it may be that cow and horse accidents kill more than dogs). In many cases, dogs attack humans when they are in groups (and excitable) and aroused by food or prey response. Just some things to consider to make the man vs. beast conflict work. |
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